Prior to September 11, the problem at LAX was simple: crowds and traffic. A million people a week used the airport as a giant funnel to get them in and out of Southern California, overtaxing the facility far beyond its capacity. Traffic jams didn't just occur on the nearby roads--they happened on the runways and in the air. Pilots had to wait their turn just to taxi to a terminal after landing.
Now, however, the frustrations of using LAX have been replaced by a set of new ones. Strict scrutiny of passengers and baggage has created never-ending lines that spill over from the buildings onto the sidewalks. Nerves fray quickly. And heavily armed National Guard troops hover over the entire scene.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan spent much of his two terms in office vowing to do something about the mess at LAX. And after six years and $60 million in planning costs, his administration created an expansion plan that would accommodate up to 89 million passengers per year--more than double the airport's current design capacity and one- third more than it handled a year ago. Riordan managed to rebuff the objections of smaller cities near the airport and environmental advocates who opposed the project.
In the wake of September 11, however, Riordan's plan seems all but dead. Four weeks after the attack, newly elected Mayor James Hahn announced a much different, much smaller proposal. At a press conference frequently drowned out by the noise of planes overhead, Hahn released a plan that would accommodate only 78 million passengers a year--a figure anti-expansion activists say they could live with-- and that would focus more on safety than providing for future growth. "We've got to take action now," Hahn fairly shouted. "We want to be the first big city in America to create the nation's most secure airport."
It remains to be seen whether Hahn's scaled-down, security-focused proposal will carry the day. There will be years more planning before any expansion project actually begins. But Hahn's announcement was indicative of how quickly the raging debate about infrastructure policy in America has changed since September 11.
Prior to the attack, the need to expand commercial air facilities was one of the few infrastructure issues on which most Americans agreed. Air travel had risen sharply in the last decade. Delays were so commonplace that they were the subject of regular congressional hearings. Plans for the future ranged from a new runway alignment in San Francisco, to a new terminal and people mover in Dallas-Ft. Worth, to a proposed third airport in suburban Chicago, to a fifth runway at the nation's busiest airport in Atlanta.
The argument in all these cities, as in Los Angeles, was not about whether new facilities were needed. It was about where they should go. Suburban politicians and their constituents who stood in the path of proposed expansion joined with environmentalists in using litigation and public protest to slow down the projects, thus increasing the ultimate cost and putting additional pressure on the overloaded air system.
It took only three days--the mid-September days when the air system was completely shut down, to recast the entire transportation debate. A dozen or more airport expansion plans, including big ones in San Francisco, Phoenix, Minneapolis and Charlotte--and in Boston, where two of the terrorist attacks originated--were reconsidered or placed on hold. Credit agencies downgraded airport bonds and put them on "watch lists" as airports saw revenue fall and security costs rise.
And, suddenly, a national system of high-speed rail routes--a rail buff's pipe dream only a week before--was at the top of the agenda. In the weeks after the attack, Alaska Representative Don Young, chairman of the Transportation Committee in the U.S. House, introduced a $71 billion high-speed rail bill--more than quintupling the size of the measure that had been on the table previously. "I have been developing this bill since mid-summer because it is the right thing to do for traveling Americans," Young said during an October hearing. "However, the tragedies of September 11, and the resulting short-term stoppage of air travel, demonstrated even more the need for transportation alternatives."
It remains to be seen whether the airport expansion plans are permanently dead and whether a national high-speed rail effort is truly feasible. But there is no question that the long security lines at airports around the country have established new rules overnight. Furthermore, the new debate is taking place in a climate not only of security concerns but of economic worries as well.
"We're a country in shock right now," says Rod Diridon, a former supervisor in Santa Clara County, California, who now serves as head of the state's High Speed Rail Authority. "So it's hard to focus on new challenges and new ways. We went from being a country that was so wealthy that we could afford a $1 trillion tax cut to one that is facing deficits at both the national and state levels."
Of course, any serious discussion of the post-September transportation future can't just be about planes and trains--it has to be about cars. While air transport and rail have received the bulk of policy makers' attention in recent weeks, highways continue to consume vast amounts of money: The federal highway budget alone is $31 billion this year. Yet freeways in metropolitan areas become more congested all the time, in part because maintenance costs so much. If transportation planners have learned anything during the past two decades, it is that it is nearly impossible to build our way out of highway gridlock. Motorists in Atlanta, Houston, Seattle and elsewhere know firsthand that more lanes simply beget more cars and trucks.
For 10 years, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) and its successor, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), have guided federal ground-transportation policy. The key provisions of ISTEA--which was pushed through Congress by current Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who at the time represented a northern California district in the House--and of TEA-21 give regional transportation agencies more power and allow the regional agencies more flexibility in determining how to use federal money.
The power shift to regions came at the expense of state transportation departments, which are intent on building highways. The power shift, plus the flexibility in spending, has resulted in far more money for urban rail projects. Still, highways have not gone wanting. TEA-21 allocates about four times as much money to highways as to transit, and TEA-21 increased overall federal spending by 40 percent.
The state highway departments and some highway lobbyists continue to fight ISTEA and TEA-21, unsuccessfully so far. In fact, as light rail becomes more popular--transit ridership has jumped about 20 percent during the past five years--the demand for rail-transit funding under TEA-21 has far outstripped the federal funding available.
There is little doubt that the events of September will increase the pressure to spend more TEA-21 money on transit. But others will be making the case that terrorism has served to underline the key role of highways in maintaining safety and security. "In times of emergency like this, highways are going to be incredibly important," says David Burwell, president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. The long-popular idea of awarding at least one pilot project to every congressional district needs to be replaced, he argues, with a metropolitan focus on all highway moneys available. A number of big- city mayors argue the same thing.
This line of reasoning hearkens to the original concept of interstate highways as crisis escape routes for civilians and pathways for the military. We should be prepared to dedicate highways to those uses during a crisis, Burwell says, noting that people were forced to flee New York on foot on September 11 partly because the roads were so congested. In the event of a future emergency, he adds, crippling blows to the national air and rail systems would leave highways as the only national lifeline for the movement of workers, materials and products.
Even if nothing had happened on September 11, the U.S. transportation system would be approaching a state of emergency right now. The last big push to build new infrastructure in the United States was during the 1950s and '60s, when the nation had only half the population of today, and the economy was a small fraction of its current size. For the better part of three decades, construction has been held back by a combination of citizen activism, environmental litigation and fiscal conservatism--a powerful combination of forces that cuts across the ideological spectrum.
Amid the economic boom of the past several years, however, public pressure to break the logjam has grown. Governors in states all over the country have set up infrastructure task forces and commissions. All of them have reached pretty much the same conclusion: Planning and building the facilities required for the future will take more money and better coordination. This past June, Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull's Transportation Vision 21 Task Force concluded that the state faced a $20 billion infrastructure funding deficit. In California, the state Department of Transportation recently shifted its environmental review process from its "planning" section to its "project delivery" section in order to speed construction of new projects.
All the task forces and planning projects dealing with ground transportation have been hampered by the deepening divide between highway advocates and exponents of transit and "smart growth." In the air, no comparable divide has existed. With the nation's hub-and-spoke air travel system groaning under the strain of a booming economy, the pressure to reduce delays and expand the system grew into a consensus that new runways and gates had to be constructed throughout the country. Unlike the argument on the ground, the one in the air hasn't been over what to build. It's been over where to put it.
Citing estimates that air passenger traffic would increase 50 percent between 2000 and 2010, Transportation Secretary Mineta earlier this year announced a federal effort to streamline airport expansion. "We are working on an initiative to streamline environmental requirements for all airport projects within the current structure of environmental laws," he told the American Association of Airport Executives. By and large, however, such decisions are local in nature, opening the door for citizen groups and environmental organizations to try to block the expansions, as they have done with substantial success throughout the past decade.
The debate over the expansion of LAX is a perfect example. Los Angeles is one of the most decentralized metropolitan areas in the nation, but LAX, which is located on one edge of the metropolis, adjacent to the ocean, provides a highly centralized air traffic system. Close to 80 percent of all air travelers to and from L.A. travel through the massive city-owned airport. In recent years, the question of whether and how to expand LAX has taken on regional dimensions. Opponents of LAX expansion have called for other, smaller airports in the region to accommodate most future air traffic growth. But neighbors to virtually all of those smaller airports have put up even more strenuous opposition--especially in Orange County, where the closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station was pegged by business leaders as the site of a new civilian airfield, but vigorously opposed by nearby cities.
With El Toro subject to endless, dueling ballot measures, and with opposition to LAX expansion rising, the federal government has been unable to do very much to force or facilitate an increase in airport capacity in Southern California. When there is local opposition, federal officials "are not really in a position to force the community to accept this as an airfield," says Michael Dardia, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. "This is an issue that the FAA is wrestling with in general."
All this pre-September maneuvering seems like ancient history for the moment. But it could return to the forefront in a few months if public confidence in the air transportation system returns. "My sense of things after talking to people in the airport business is that we're in a wait-and-see mode," says Geoffrey Gosling, of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Much depends on the events, or nonevents, of the next few months. "It's not as if the forces that caused people to reconsider their travel patterns are all in the past."
The American transportation system has been shaped during periods of crisis, especially during wartime. The regional strife that led to the Civil War jump-started the national railroad system, as symbolized by the transcontinental railroad stretching from Omaha to Sacramento. President Abraham Lincoln, a former railroad lawyer, believed that railroads could knit the country together in the same way that the Civil War could split it apart. That is one reason the federal government continued to subsidize the railroad effort during the Civil War, even when the war and the massive building project competed with one another for iron and other materials.
The interstate highway system, our crowning infrastructure achievement during the post-World War II era, was largely a product of the Cold War. There was little doubt that a system of limited-access highways was needed, and local and state efforts had already created the beginnings of the system in New York, California and elsewhere. But proponents of the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 sold it to Congress and the public largely as a defense measure. They envisioned a highway system that would allow quick movement of missiles and other weapons, as well as speedy evacuation of civilians living in crowded cities.
As the nation's history would predict, the crisis that began on September 11 has created its own political openings. Just a week before the terrorist attack, few people noticed as rail advocates such as former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and economic analyst Robert Kuttner challenged the seemingly firm consensus in favor of massive airport expansion. Dukakis, now a vice chairman of Amtrak, wrote an op/ed article insisting that "the answer to airport chaos is not forcing communities to accept more runways or new, expanded airports. The answer is high-speed rail."
Once the attack occurred, however, these minority views quickly spread across the ideological spectrum. Conservative columnist George Will came out in favor of high-speed rail, not only along the East Coast corridor but in his native Midwest. Then, three weeks after the attack, came Representative Young's $71 billion proposal for federal support of a national high-speed rail system. Although rail advocates quibbled with details of Young's bill, they generally rallied around it.
Since then, the momentum has increased. "If anything, the need to do something far more aggressive on rail is much more palpable now than it was before September 11th," says David King, North Carolina's deputy transportation secretary and vice chairman of the 21-member States for Passenger Rail Coalition. The terrorist attack, he adds, "does not change the plans, it changes the sense of urgency, especially in the short-haul market."
The high-speed-rail idea has been kicking around Capitol Hill and a number of state capitals for nearly a decade. During the Clinton administration, the federal Department of Transportation designated 10 regional corridors eligible for federal planning assistance, including the Northeast Corridor; routes connecting major cities in Florida, Texas, the Midwest and the Northwest; and a north-south route in California. In each case, an update of rails to high-speed status holds the potential for trains to run at speeds of 125 to 150 miles per hour. For runs between major cities 200 to 400 miles apart, a two- to three-hour travel time would be competitive with a door-to-door trip involving air travel--just as it already is in Amtrak's New York- Washington corridor.
Generally speaking, however, high-speed rail was moving at a very low speed prior to September 11. California's Rail Authority had been gearing up for a major effort, but Governor Gray Davis--who has ridiculed the project as "Buck Rogers technology"--cut the budget so deeply that the authority could barely keep its offices open. In Florida, voters had approved the idea of a high-speed rail system connecting Tampa, Orlando and Miami, but Governor Jeb Bush made no secret of his disdain for the project. And Don Young's U.S. House Subcommittee on Railroads had held hearings on a modest $12 billion proposal that seemed unlikely ever to become law.
But now the House is preparing to consider Young's $71 billion bill, introduced after the terrorist attack, which would come much closer to funding the federal share of an extensive high-speed rail system. And California lawmakers are asking for restoration of the high-speed rail budget. Increasing numbers of infrastructure experts are saying that in a post-September 11 world, regional high-speed rail is not only viable but a necessary part of the solution to America's transportation needs. "We're hamstrung when one element of our system breaks down, as the airlines have right now," says California's Ron Diridon. "For certain short trips," adds David Shultz of Northwestern University's Infrastructure Technology Institute, "the hassle of air transportation doesn't make any sense now."
The downside of high-speed rail is the cost. The federal government provides large amounts of money for highway and airport expansions largely because those systems receive billions of dollars of revenue from users. Gas taxes and passenger fees provide billions of dollars to maintain and build facilities. Rail, by contrast, runs at a deficit. The capital cost of constructing a high-speed system would have to be borne almost entirely by the public sector. One of the biggest costs would be the thousands of grade separations required to allow trains to run at speeds approaching 150 miles per hour. And it is unclear whether the operating costs would be recouped.
Some rail advocates say that the basic system is in place and the upgrade cost won't be as exorbitant as many fear. "It really is a matter of making incremental improvements with a goal that it will become high speed," says North Carolina's King. But others disagree. "I think that rail advocates like rail but don't take the perspective that economists take," says Steven A. Morrison, an economics professor at Northeastern University in Boston who has studied both air and rail travel extensively. "I like rail. I find traveling by rail far more pleasurable than flying. But that comes at a cost."
It is not clear what form federal aid would take, even if it is approved. Representative Young and other Republicans have called for federal tax credits. But state officials are wary of that idea. Nevada State Treasurer Brian Krolicki, who chairs the National Association of State Treasurers Committee on Credit Rating and Debt Management, says the federal government must provide tax-exempt bonds if rail financing is to find success in the private marketplace. Even beyond that is the question of who would operate the regional systems. The one experienced railroad operator in the nation is Amtrak--and Amtrak's involvement is usually the kiss of death for rail proposals on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, rail critics are complaining that high-speed rail would be not only costly but unsafe. Richard Nadler recently pointed out in the National Review that the death rate per passenger mile for trains is much higher than for airplanes. And, he added, "most major wars since 1840 demonstrate rail transport's tragic vulnerability to low-tech sabotage. Air traffic requires intense security at key points, namely airports. But for rail, mile after mile of track, bridges, switching stations and trusses must be protected from low-cost explosives."
The debate between rail advocates and rail skeptics has been going on for years--it is likely to continue years longer. But the ultimate problem isn't whether we are flying or traveling by train. It is the casual way we have approached transportation security that makes our entire system vulnerable.
In a prescient article in Transportation Research News last year, Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that nearly all of the nation's interconnected transportation system could be penetrated by terrorists. As an example, he pointed out that an importer shipping a cargo container to New Jersey can off- load it from Asia in Los Angeles and still have 30 days to transport it across the continent before customs regulations require him to file a manifest in Newark. During those 30 days, virtually anything can be smuggled in or smuggled out. "Security must no longer be a neglected element of the transportation system," Flynn concluded. Perhaps the lesson of September 11 is not that airplanes are potentially vulnerable but that a large and powerful nation must learn to create a transportation system that is both balanced enough and secure enough to allow the nation to function during a calamity, no matter which mode is attacked.
